“Legacy” Report Lambasted: Economist Calls LSU Analysis in Support of Oil...
Louisiana oil companies suffered a major setback last week in their effort to restrict lawsuits brought by property owners seeking cleanup of land and groundwater contamination left behind from decades...
View ArticleFirst Criminal Charges Filed in Gulf Oil Spill: Former BP Drilling Engineer...
Federal prosecutors have arrested a former BP engineer for intentionally destroying key evidence detailing how much oil was spewing into the Gulf of Mexico from the blownout Macondo Well in the early,...
View ArticleSix Hundred Days of Blasting: Miami’s Beloved Biscayne Bay Faces Destruction...
Biscayne Bay's pristine tropical waters teem with exotic marine life from manatees to dolphins to "super corals" to environmentally critical sea grasses. Strips of mangroves and wetlands cushion the...
View ArticleToxic Oysters: Heavy Metals Have Entered Gulf Food Chain, Could Inhibit...
It's official: The BP oil spill has poisoned the iconic Gulf oyster. And the fallout, according to scientists, could be devastating to the surrounding ecosystem and the people who work the Gulf waters....
View ArticleSellout of the Century: UK’s “Greenest Ever” Olympic Games Embrace BP as...
It was billed as the "greenest Games ever." Hailed as the most environmentally friendly Olympics since the Greeks raced chariots through the streets of Athens (or some such equally ridiculous claim)....
View ArticleClock Is Ticking In Fight To Save “Legacy” Lawsuits Against Big Oil
The choice facing Louisiana lawmakers over so-called "legacy lawsuits" against oil-and-gas drillers isn't nearly as complicated it sounds. Between now and the end of their session next month,...
View ArticleThis Probably Won’t Make BP’s Next Tourism Ad: Tar Mat Off Alabama Beach
It's hard to turn on your TV these days and avoid those cloying spots for Gulf Coast tourism that BP is spending millions of dollars on -- proving that the only thing the company behind the Deepwater...
View ArticleLegacy Lawsuits: Sometimes The Smartest Action Is To Do Nothing
For weeks now I've been telling you about the mud-covered debate taking place in the Louisiana Legislature. Politicians greased to the gills by Big Oil dollars are now pushing an effort that would...
View ArticleBirds of Prey: White Pelicans in Minnesota Are Contaminated By Oil, Corexit...
Last week, many people were pained to see -- for the first time --photographs by government experts showing dead, oiled sea turtles taken in the weeks immediately after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon...
View ArticleLouisiana Isn’t Protecting Its Residents From Hazardous Chemical Spills, So...
Louisiana has richly deserved its nickname, "Sportsman's Paradise." At its best, the state's bayous, teeming with wildlife, and the once-bountiful marine environment of the Gulf of Mexico truly have...
View ArticleSummer’s Here, And There’s Something Missing From The Gulf of Mexico
Memorial Day is considered the official start of summer -- even down here on the Gulf where the mercury's been rising for some time now. It's a great holiday for hitting the beach, going camping, and...
View ArticleLouisiana’s Toothless Tiger, the DEQ, Once Again Fails a Battered Waterfront...
When government fails to work on your behalf, the consequences are all too real. And for many years, the main governmental agency tasked with protecting the fragile environment here in the Bayou State...
View ArticleTwo years and billions of dollars later, justice is elusive for charter boat...
If there's been one common thread in the 26 months since BP and its reckless behavior decimated the Gulf of Mexico, it has been people from Big Oil or the government trying to insist that the situation...
View ArticleWall Street Journal relies on debunked data to make the case for Big Oil on...
"Louisiana has had its fair share of oil troubles..." Those are the opening words of an editorial that ran in the Wall Street Journal recently, and its hard to disagree with that. While oil exploration...
View ArticleWhen the fungi strike oil: One more way that BP’s spill is still destroying...
There have been some stories recently that really confirm some of our worst fears about the aftermath of Deepwater Horizon -- about what kind of havoc would be wreaked upon the beautiful and fragile...
View ArticleThe federal government, having learned nothing from 2010 disaster, plows...
There was a report the other day that officials at my alma mater, Louisiana State University, are taking a good chunk of the money they received from the BP legal settlement and spending it on mental...
View ArticleIt’s not just oil spills: Our oceans are under more stress than they can handle
I saw on the news today that a new tropical storm is forming in the Gulf of Mexico. When you're from New Orleans, that always grabs your attention. It looks like the Crescent City will be spared --...
View ArticleShrimp contamination confirmed: Signs that the nightmare in the Gulf is not...
Unfortunately, every day seems to bring new reminders that the environmental nightmare unleashed by BP into the Gulf of Mexico in the spring of 2010 is not over. Sometimes, these things practically hit...
View ArticleTale of Two Continents: A Quest For Justice for Chinese Fisherman Harmed by...
Imagine, if you will, an oil spill that in all too many ways is very much like BP's 2010 Deepwater Horizon catastrophe off the Gulf Coast. A major global oil giant, partnering on a deepwater oil rig in...
View ArticleDolphin die-off in the Gulf is ignored by U.S. media, which pushes happy talk...
In the U.S. media this week, I read more happy talk about "the comeback" of the Gulf Coast, at least in the casino-drenched city of Biloxi. I had to turn to the Canadian media to read about the ongoing...
View Article“Keystone Kops”: Major pipeline spills raise serious questions about safety...
For a lot of American environmentalists, the Keystone XL pipeline project was a major wakeup call about the rising, out-of-control power of Big Oil in this country, stretching all the way to the...
View ArticleMore BP fallout: Will the baby birds ever come back to Cat Island?
There was a story a couple of weeks agoabout the aftermath of the 2010 BP oil spill that got a fair amount of attention, including on this blog. A researcher had discovered that the oil slick from the...
View ArticleNew report sheds light on an alarming trend: Government muzzling scientists
It's getting harder and harder to be a scientist in America these days -- especially if you work for, or work with the federal government, or if you cross one of the favored companies of our political...
View Article“The Gulf’s best tourism season in years” soaks an Alabama family in tarballs
At this point, it's probably beating a dead horse to make fun of those omnipresent ads for BP promoting tourism along the Gulf of Mexico -- the ones that call it "the Gulf’s best tourism season in...
View ArticleThe problem is that the Gulf was already under attack even before BP added 5...
There's one thing that's very important to remember when we talk about the Gulf of Mexico and the aftermath of the BP oil disaster. Which is this: That it's not as if everything was all hunky-dory in...
View ArticlePollution fighters catch ExxonMobil in a Baton Rouge big lie
This is a bad news/good news post about a major threat to public health that most folks outside of Louisiana don't know about, and how a hearty band of citizens was able to get results in the face of a...
View ArticleDay of the dolphin: BP spill played key role in die-off
We've said it before, and we'll say it again: The Gulf was under enormous environmental pressures before April 20, 2011, the date that the Deepwater Horizon rig blew up and killed 11 workers and then...
View ArticleOlympics sponsor BP wins both a gold and a silver in environmental recklessness
As a lifelong resident of the Gulf, I've already expressed my outrage and dismay at learning that BP -- yes, that BP, British Petroleum, spiller of roughly 5 million barrels of oil into one of the...
View Article“Something really disastrous happening in the Gulf”: Research proves BP’s...
There's an old saying in legal circles that the cover-up is always much worse than the initial crime. It's hard to say if that is exactly true with the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico...
View ArticleFrom New York to New Orleans, noise pollution terrorizes the public
Shhhhhh. Can you hear me? We need to talk again. A couple of times since I started this blog, I've told you about another environmental battle that I've been waging in my hometown for a long time -- a...
View ArticleLouisiana covers up risk to Bayou town from sinkhole, massive methane leak
Here we go again. Once again, a corner of Louisiana is under an environmental assault, threatening both the health and the immediate safety of local residents. Once again, the cause appears to be the...
View ArticleIf another major pipeline spill doesn’t convince them to kill Keystone XL,...
When will America ever learn? Industry and some government officials -- helped sometimes by mixed signals from the Obama administration -- continue to push for the Keystone XL pipeline to run across...
View ArticleIncompetent Louisiana regulators knew of risk at sinkhole site since early 2011
It's hard to know which is the worst thing about the ongoing environmental nightmare in the southeastern Louisiana community of Bayou Corne, where a massive sinkhole has forced an evacuation after...
View ArticleDisappearing La. speckled trout another blow to BP’s Big Lie
You can add speckled trout to the list. Over the last several months, I've told you about all kinds of reports about serious problems to both the safety and available of Gulf seafood. Eyeless shrimp....
View ArticleUPDATE: Sinkhole crisis worsens, 2 workers rescued, town braces for possible...
The nightmare in Bayou Corne -- the besieged small town in southeastern Louisiana coping with the effects of a massive sinkhole, compounded by the incompetence of state bureaucrats -- keeps getting...
View ArticleThreat to Bayou Corne grows as tests show elevated levels of radium, butane...
Elevated levels of radium in the water and tests showing airborne indicators of butane -- the highly explosive fuel stored in a nearby cavern -- are two alarming signs that the environmental...
View ArticleUpdate: Expert says Louisiana officials “in denial” over radium risk at sinkhole
A veteran radiation expert says Louisiana environmental officials are "in denial" over the hazard posed by elevated radium levels discovered in the slurry liquids of the massive sinkhole that has...
View ArticleIsaac likely to bring grim, oily reminders of 2010 BP spill to Gulf coastline
Tropical Storm Isaac is bearing down on the Louisiana coast and is likely to become a hurricane later today, before making landfall somewhere close to New Orleans. This is not good news for either my...
View ArticleBP cleanup crews spotted as Isaac stirs up oil, bad memories
For residents of the battered Gulf Coast, Hurricane Isaac didn't just bring sheets of rain, pummeling winds, and a powerful storm surge. The slow moving, deceptively destructive Category 1 hurricane...
View ArticleBombshell: Feds slam BP in key court filing, admit pollution from 2010 spill...
In a bombshell federal court filing, U.S. government lawyers are slamming British Petroleum for making false and misleading statements that seek to both dodge blame for 2010's Deepwater Horizon...
View ArticleWorst fears about BP oil washing ashore after Isaac are coming true
Last week, I reported on this blog there were early indications that Hurricane Isaac had indeed whipped up some of as much as 1 million gallons of BP's spill oil that remain in the Gulf, assaulting...
View ArticleBreaking: Spill settlement unraveling as Halliburton slams deal; BP stock...
BP's $8.7 billion attempt to put the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill behind it continues to come undone. In the latest unraveling of the oil giant's proposed settlement with thousands of Gulf residents...
View ArticleLouisiana unloads and blows giant hole in BP settlement
For the last 29 months, I've been chronicling the widespread and still-very-much-ongoing fallout from BP's gross negligence -- "a corporate culture of recklessness," as U.S. government lawyers called...
View ArticleWe object: Why BP’s $8.7 billion deal is “a failed settlement”
The last couple of weeks have brought a lot of news – both good and bad – down here to the Gulf Coast. Hurricane Isaac was a double whammy; the storm itself destroyed homes and upended people’s lives,...
View ArticleNow, BP claims it wants to clean up Gulf — but not until it spends more on PR
You've got to say this about British Petroleum -- they have some nerve. For more than two years, we've been reporting about all the lingering fallout from the Deepwater Horizon disaster -- the sick and...
View ArticleLouisiana DEQ bungles a toxic nightmare from Hurricane Isaac
In recent months, I've joined with the Louisiana Bucket Brigade and others in calling for the state's Department of Environmental Quality, or DEQ, to be stripped of its powers and for the federal...
View ArticleA temporary reprieve from Shell’s risky and reckless Arctic drilling scheme
For the last couple of weeks, we've been consumed with the never-ending fallout from BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster. Some 29 months after the explosion that killed 11 people and spewed 5 million...
View ArticleTorn on the bayou: Sinkhole keeps getting bigger, more dangerous
A lot has happened over the last few weeks. In the political world, the presidential race between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney sees a new kerfuffle every few hours. Down here in Louisiana, we've been...
View ArticleThe sinkhole keeps getting bigger, and so do the lies of Texas Brine Co.
The crisis involving the Bayou Corne sinkhole in Louisiana just doesn't stop. In what's becoming an almost daily headline, the sinkhole grew again, swallowing up more trees and even part of an access...
View ArticleNew Orleans memo: You can still have great music without noise pollution
Sometimes a name can tell you a lot. In the past, I've told you about my enthusiastic support for a New Orleans group, active on Facebook and the Internet, that's called "Hear the Music, Stop the...
View Article